Understanding the forces and mechanisms that shape the great amount of variation in plant functional traits (e.g. seed mass, woody density, specific leaf area) and life history traits (e.g. longevity, reproductive output, growth rate) is fundamental for effective predictions of viability, invasions and evolutionary pressures. Recent work using functional trait approaches and life history approaches have shown remarkable similarities in the way plant diversity is structured, with two predominant axes of variation predicting upwards of 60%. Here, I extend the recently introduced “fast-slow continuum & reproductive strategy” framework to quantify the variation in plant life history strategies worldwide, using high-resolution demographic information from 650 plant species archived in the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database, which contains matrix population models and biogeographic attributes of plants worldwide, and combine it with functional traits to demonstrate the utility of combining both ecological disciplines.
Results/Conclusions
Having basic information about the allocations of plants onto vasculature tissue (or survival) and seed mass and seed number (or reproduction) allows researchers to infer key ecological properties such as population growth rate and resilience. The fast-slow continuum & reproductive strategy framework relates to important fields in ecology, allowing for a formal connection between demography and, for instance, the leaf economics spectrum. I found that the specific leaf area, sourced from the TRY database, can be reliably predicted from the allocations to survival and reproduction, and that these, together, help predict species in risk of local extinction vs species that may become invasive, on the other hand. However, relatively low R2 values result from this approach. I argue that this is so because the provenance of functional trait data (TRY) and demographic data (COMPADRE) for a given species differ in geographic and micro-climatic distance. In an effort to improve the predictive ability of functional trait demography, I introduce the StrateGo network (https://strategonetwork.wordpress.com), a distributed network of field ecologists interested in coupling functional trait and demographic data from the same location and species. I review how the network operates, its main goals, approaches, and opportunities.